Cisco Enhances Intelligent SAN Switching through Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS 1.3

SAN JOSE, Calif., November 18, 2003 - Cisco today introduced numerous advanced storage networking capabilities for the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Intelligent directors and fabric switches that utilize both Cisco innovations and open industry standards to help customers build more secure, manageable, and scalable storage area networks (SANs).

These software features are available through the Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS 1.3, the latest version of the platform's operating system, that further enhances the intelligent network services and integrated management features already available today. With Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS 1.3, Cisco is delivering several industry firsts for functionality integrated into SAN switches. Highlights include:

• First SAN switch to offer routing capabilities through Inter-VSAN Routing, which will allows servers in different virtual SANs (VSANs) to share common storage resources (disk and tape) located either locally or remotely, while maintaining the security, scalability and availability benefits of VSANs. While each VSAN provides an independent set of SAN services and strict traffic isolation, Inter-VSAN Routing enables selective transfer of data traffic between devices on different VSANs without merging VSANs into a single logical fabric. Additionally, Inter-VSAN routing can be deployed across geographically dispersed sites to enable disaster recovery and business continuity applications that are more manageable, resilient and scalable.

• First SAN switch to offer Quality of Service (QoS), which allows Cisco MDS 9000 SANs to differentiate and prioritize storage traffic dynamically based on the specific requirements of the data. For example, with QoS capabilities a Cisco MDS 9000 SAN is able to give priority to latency-sensitive applications such as online transaction processing (OLTP) in favor of throughput-intensive applications such as data warehousing.

• First SAN switch to offer both Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) Write Acceleration and Compression, which reduces write input/output (I/O) latency and increases bandwidth utilization during FCIP transactions. These enhancements will improve business continuity/disaster recovery by allowing customers to extend their FCIP connections over longer distances while reducing application response times.

• First SAN switch to be able to support intermixing of open systems protocols (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, FCIP) and FICON (Fiber Connector) with FICON CUP (Control Unit Port) management on the same switch through VSANs. Being able to manage mainframe systems using the Cisco MDS 9000 protects the customer's investment in these legacy devices, which are still widely available in enterprise data centers.

Cisco Fabric Manager Server

The Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS 1.3 also includes an enhanced, server-based version of the Cisco Fabric Manager, the embedded, graphical network management tool for the entire Cisco MDS 9000 Family. Cisco Fabric Manager Server (FMS) offers three significant enhancements: One, centralized management of multiple physical fabrics; two, continuous discovery, health, and event monitoring; and three, historical performance monitoring with drill-down capability to analyze statistics for items such as inter-switch links, route flows, and PortChannels.

Support for Industry Standard Proposals

Along with these Cisco innovations, the Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS 1.3 offers support for several proposed open industry standards in the areas of SAN security and management.

For SAN security, the Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS 1.3 provides support of switch-to-switch and server-to-switch authentication through Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP), designed to prevent intrusion from unauthorized devices, and Terminal Access Controller Access Control System (TACACS+), giving customers another option in addition to RADIUS for authentication, authorization, and accounting of their switches.

New features addressing SAN management include support for embedded Common Information Model (CIM) interface based on the Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S), Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS) protocol, which automates the discovery, management, and configuration of iSCSI devices, and Fabric Device Management Interface (FDMI), which provides Cisco MDS 9000 users a standard way to manage all of their host bus adapters (HBAs) from a single, central location instead of having to manage them separately from individual servers.

"Improving storage utilization and application availability are high priorities for today's enterprises. To meet this goal, IT managers need to boost the scalability, reliability and manageability of their storage area networks," said Richard Villars, Vice President of storage research at IDC. "SAN interconnect and manageability features like those that Cisco is adding to its Cisco MDS 9000 products will help IT managers build and operate a more intelligent, reliable and sophisticated networked storage environments while reducing administrative burdens."

Expected Availability

The Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS 1.3 is now available to Cisco's Original Storage Manufacturer partners for interoperability qualification testing.

"IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller for Cisco MDS 9000 Solution will be IBM's first application of Cisco SAN-OS 1.3 operating system platform," said Peter Thurston, IBM SAN Switch Marketing Manager. "By integrating IBM's storage virtualization technology and FICON switching into the Cisco MDS 9000, customers will have more options to integrate and virtualize their storage networks for the on demand world."